Tutorial: How to export a video with transparency

[jonray]

Thank you @ejmillan and @MusicalBox for your observations. I will look into this tomorrow when I can grab a moment. Very interesting stuff!

[jonray]

@MusicalBox

it may be faster (but maybe not as efficient) to just add a Sharpen filter in Shotcut.

OMG , the sharpen filter!! Why didn’t I think of that!!! Doh, will experiment with that tomorrow. @MusicalBox, did you use the sharpen filter on yours, and if so, what were your settings? Thanks!

[MusicalBox]

@jonray

did you use the sharpen filter on yours, and if so, what were your settings?

Hi @jonray. I didn’t use the Sharpen filter in the tutorial. Didn’t think of it at the moment.
I don’t remember exactly what settings I use for the captures I posted above, but I always keep the size low, between 10% and 15%, then I play with the amount. I think it was around 60%, but I’m not sure.

[ejmillan]

This thread is straying from its original topic, sorry.
Either way, it’s interesting stuff.
I looked into this particular issue and found that W10 does not enable “Stereo Mix” as a recording device by default. That’s why I didn’t have any audio input device in ShareX.
So I just had to enable this in the W10 audio settings.
This does not seem to affect OBS Studio, as it can capture audio from the desktop without enabling Stereo Mixing. I guess the extra step I needed in ShareX, is not needed in OBS and it already installs what is needed by default.

[MusicalBox]

Don’t worry about going off topic @ejmillan. Like you say it’s interesting stuff. Anybody brave enough to read all the 64 posts in the thread will probably learn something they don’t know about Shotcut. And I’m happy about that.

[bentacular]

All of a sudden, I’m getting a lot of questions about the resulting file saying “invalid.” Did the newer version of Shotcut lose something that no longer allows this?

I tried to replicate it myself and this is what I got on both VLC and Shotcut…

[MusicalBox]

Yes, this is said to be fixed in the next release. You can read about this in this post:

Invalid when template file is included

Hi, I would to have some text templates in order to open and modify these in future clip. After several attempts, that’s not working. Template come from this forum. Better than words, I made a video and I don’t know why it’s not working. Many thanks for your help and sorry for my bad english.

[bentacular]

Got it!

[PaulusMaximus]

I’ve just tried this with a project that I’m doing. When bringing the exported transparent video into another project (the .mov), the exported video is transparent. However whilst the “background” (the chroma keyed background) works as intended, I have, within the original exported project an image that is 60% translucent. That image’s translucence is lost when brought into the new project.

So the 60% translucence of the image is lost when exported and brought into the new project. However in the project (not the new one but the .mov export) If I add a video below the the 60% translucent image, I can see that the video “passes through” the 60% translucent images on the tracks above.

So the workaround would be to just add the main video on the lowest video track and export but the .mov contains 12 video tracks (excluding the main video) and my machine takes an age to export just a few seconds of the .mov.

So, has anyone got any potential ideas to export the transparent mov whilst also retaining partial transparency of the images within the .mov when exported?

I’m thinking this is just the nature/limitation of exporting /chroma/transparency/partial transparency and I’m not going to achieve what I want.

Any feedback appreciated.